A Flowering of Experiment

Donald Barthelme and the Perils of His Acclaim as a 1960s Literary Star

By

Kyle Smith

Updated Feb. 21, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Hiding ManBy Tracy Daugherty St. Martin's, 581 pages, $35

At a Surrealist-art show in the 1950s in Houston, where Donald Barthelme grew up, the writer saw a small fur-coated work that he never forgot. It was probably Meret Oppenheim's iconic "Object" (1936), a furry teacup, saucer and spoon, but Barthelme's wife at the time, who recollected the moment, was less clear about the piece of art than about its effect on her husband. It inspired Barthelme's "favorite line in his fiction," she said. That would be this one, from the early short story "Florence Green Is 81": "The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered in fur which breaks your heart."

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Robert Hunt

Bringing the gallery to the typewriter, Barthelme frolicked in the marvelously askew. He wrote short stories such as "Me and Miss Mandible," in which an insurance-claims adjuster finds himself in grade school among 11-year-olds, and "Game," a Strangelovian tale of two military officers and their dwindling sanity as they await instructions in an underground missile-control bunker. On the more difficult end came "The Indian Uprising," in which the world and love shatter against a legacy of bloodshed that ties Vietnam to the Indian wars, and "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel," a plotless discussion of irony between a vague "Q" and "A."

In a fond if somewhat defensive biography, Tracy Daugherty tries to make the most of Barthelme's work, and the enthusiasm is catching. But what quickly becomes clear is that Barthelme died both too old and too young. If this aggressively 1960s writer, a tireless contributor to The New Yorker, had expired before men started to trim their hair above their ears again, he might be an icon in the countercultural cathedral. If, instead of succumbing to cancer in 1989 at age 58, he had spent another 20 years making his case, he might have died as America's Borges. Instead his reputation struggles for footing, yanked toward oblivion and pulled back into doting memory by a gang of friends, admirers and associates (John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon) who are themselves obsolescing and would rather not.

Mr. Daugherty studied under Barthelme when the older man, unsteady with drink and steadily deflating in ambition, returned from many years on the New York literary scene to the University of Houston in the 1980s to teach creative writing and accept veneration. "Hiding Man" is a frankly admiring literary biography, weighty with literary exegesis and eager to pursue Barthelme's art to its shuddering core. As respectful as Mr. Daugherty is, though, his book can be gently damning.

‘If the divorce did not come through immediately, freeing Don to marry Birgit, and if the child arrived before the couple left Copenhagen, then they would have to "keep moving from country to country." Don would be like the Flying Dutchman.’

Barthelme's short attention span -- his four novels never gained the traction of his stories -- carried over to his women. He burned through four wives (one was a suicide; the other three remember him forgivingly), but his fidelity was unwavering when it came to the bottle. "I'm a little drunk all the time," he once confessed to a colleague (who replied, "I know, Don"). Salman Rushdie tells Mr. Daugherty that Barthelme was "so drunk that I had the feeling of not really having met him."

The stories veered between the jokey and the abstruse. Messrs. Coover and Pynchon, for all their postmodern stunts, never came up with high-concept stories that could have easily morphed into an Adam Sandler movie (like "Billy Madison," which resembles "Me and Miss Mandible"). Recall another New Yorker contributor, cartoonist Roz Chast, and her image of a row of storefronts labeled "Antiques," "Collectibles," "Bric-a-brac" and "Garbage." Mr. Barthelme's better stories line up approximately as "Postmodernist Inquiry," "Pop Art Collage," "Pastiche" and "Spoof."

At his worst, Barthelme was intoxicated with his own complexity. Some stories became what his fans might call less "accessible" and what others would peg as unreadable. One of them, "The Explanation," begins with a black square discussed by the characters "Q" and "A" (them again!). Mr. Daugherty catches Barthelme, who obsessed over the appearance of his work on the page, asking his publisher for a different black square to replace the original. "Sentence" is an eight-page unbroken word-string about sentences; the story is not a sentence in the grammatical sense, though it is in the punitive one. Gore Vidal's verdict: "Mr. Barthelme is very deep into fiction's R and D (Research and Development) as opposed to the old-fashioned R and R (Rest and Recuperation)."

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Barthelme was crowned by more success than any short-story writer would dream of today -- as a young man, he simply moved to the Dylan-era Village (where Tom Wolfe once sublet his apartment), hung his shingle at The New Yorker and made a living off literary fireworks alone instead of paychecking it through journalism or teaching. But the loud acclaim was never loud enough, and then it faded away.

In the 1980s, Raymond Carver-style minimalism -- sized up by Mr. Daugherty as "six-word sentences about fast food and television" -- became the new fad, leaving the once innovative Barthelme-ism to be recast as outdated. Barthelme's 1983 collection, "Overnight to Many Distant Cities," "repels any understanding whatsoever," wrote critic Jonathan Penner, adding that "what this book says is that nothing can be said." Other critics were less kind. When Barthelme ghostwrote a college assignment for his daughter, it got a D.

Becoming a paterfamilias at a Houston university -- and in the creativity-credentialing sector, no less -- was an appropriate fate for a congenital slayer of fathers, literary and otherwise. "A Picture History of the War" (1964) begins: "Kellerman, gigantic with gin, runs through the park at noon with his naked father slung under one arm." Donald Barthelme Sr. was such a prominent architect in Houston that his son was invariably introduced at parties simply as the great man's offspring.

Barthelme had scarcely settled into teaching writing before he was himself written off. Tired, he told George Plimpton in a 1984 public-television interview that literary experimentation leads to "dead ends." Novelist Oscar Hijuelos remembers Barthelme saying that he wanted to write a straightforward, non-post-anything book about growing up in Texas -- yet he couldn't, "because no one would expect that from him." Such a book might have proved Barthelme's monument. Instead, he settled for being merely the barker at a traveling carnival, now long gone.

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